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do you think the universe fights for souls to be together?
some things are too strange and strong to be coincidences.
— emery allen
-:-
There’s a world where he doesn’t die.
No jewel in the lake, no prince to protect, no monster in the woods. He goes for a walk with the prince of Zandar and goes home again. There’s no flash of gold light, no six hundred years of darkness, no leaving his family behind. Never finding a new one. He might be happier in that world, or he might not be.
But in that world, he never meets her.
In that world, he finds a gold stone that isn’t magic. He pockets it, goes on with his life, and doesn’t think about it much. It looked special when it was shining on the ground, but now it’s in his hands and it weighs him down like an anchor. There’s no sparkle, no hint of something deeper, something wild and wonderful lurking in its depths.
It’s just a gold stone. He doesn’t know why he keeps taking it out to look at it, like it means something. It doesn’t mean anything. He offers it to his sister and forgets about it eventually. The world is full of gold, after all. It’s only special if it needs to be.
Some days, he wakes up from a nightmare that he’ll never understand. Before the sun has even risen, his heartbeat jolts him wide awake, wild and racing, mind full of monsters that don’t exist, monsters he’ll never know. His hands are shaking, sweat trickling down his neck, and even his mother’s tea can’t calm him down.
He never goes back to sleep, those long, tremorous nights. Stays awake and stares out a window at stars that seem unfamiliar all of a sudden, even though he’s known them all his life. The trees rustle in the woods, winds whistling through the leaves. They seem empty, seem like they should have something inside. A monster, a jewel, an adventure.
Friends. Sometimes, he imagines friends. People laughing, sparring with him, gems shining on their necks. He doesn’t know them, but they know him, they know everything about him in these flashes of another life.
And then he looks away, and the spell is broken. He has friends here. He has a family here. He can’t concieve of a life where he doesn’t, where it was stolen from him as brutally as murder. There one afternoon, and gone the next.
Those things don’t happen to knights of Zandar. They only happen in fairytales.
-:-
She’s not smiling when he meets her. Actually, she’s rarely smiling. Most of the time, she’s frowning at someone or studying her work intently. There is very little soft or friendly about Kendall Morgan.
He’d known princesses once. Duchesses and ladies of the court. Queens in bright dresses and brighter jewels. The court of Zandar was nothing less than glittering, even in its poorest days.
She is so very unlike the women he used to know, and yet so much the same, somehow. He comes down to their base on his lunch breaks and sits there to watch her work. She doesn’t say anything, so he figures she doesn’t mind, although sometimes she looks at him strangely. Like she can’t figure out what he’s doing there.
Truth be told, neither can he. She opens holograms and creates energy from magic and figures out how to pilot zords, and six hundred years ago, she would’ve been a maid, maybe. A merchant or a blacksmith, if she were lucky. A princess, if she were luckier than most.
He can’t imagine her as a princess. He can’t imagine her as a maid, either. He’s met both of them, and the times have changed so much, he can’t see anything of his home in this new town they call Amber Beach. He can’t see anything of the past in the future.
“Does it ever feel weird?” she asks him once, tossing him a charger she’s just finished and watching as he fumbles for it, startled out of his musings by her voice. “Being in the future?”
It takes him a moment to find his words. The charger feels hot in his hands. “Well, of course, Miss Morgan.” He looks down; the battery glows golden. At his chest, his energem warms considerably. “Everything feels…weird.”
Even the word weird feels weird, shaped oddly in his mouth, not quite what he’d say if he were home. But he’s not home, or, he is home, but it’s a different home, a new home, a strange home. A stranger in a strange time. He wonders if Koda ever got used to it.
“I bet,” Kendall says, opening her hand for him to give her back the charger now that it’s reacted to his energem. “I guess in your day, women couldn’t be scientists, right? Is that why you come watch me work?”
He presses the charger into her hands and says, carefully, “I watch you work because you are remarkable, Miss Morgan. I’ve known quite a few remarkable women in my time – then and now. You’re not so different from how women were in those days. You have the same spirit and the same drive.”
Her fingers curl around the charger, but otherwise she remains still. “Really? Even the princesses?”
Ivan grins at her. “Especially the princesses.”
-:-
Princess Catherine of Zandar was said to be one of the most beautiful women in the land. Princes would come from all over the continent to court her hand, and all would be refused with a shake of her head. She despised marriage well past her adolescence and the appropriate marrying age for young women, and her parents were too indulgent of their first-born – after many trials and suffering – child to do anything about it.
Ivan knew this very well. In another world, he loved her.
In the world where he doesn’t die, he rides with Prince Colin back to the castle and delivers him safely into his older sister’s waiting arms. Catherine looks up and smiles at him, the best knight in Zandar, chosen personally to be the crown prince’s bodyguard, and the most handsome to boot, if the maids were to be believed.
He bows to her. She ushers her little brother back to his bedroom and stays to talk to the knight. This isn’t their first meeting, and in this world, it won’t be their last.
She says, “You’re so young to have the prince’s life in your hands. Don’t you get scared?”
Ivan clasps his hands behind his back, her arm looped through his elbow. The sun sets over the gardens of the palace. Nobody has called for the princess yet; nobody would dare.
“Your Highness,” he says, just as carefully as he would with Kendall in the other world, “I do not fear death, and I would die before I let harm come to your brother.”
It’s a knight’s code of conduct. He doesn’t know that, in a time where he found a gem that sparkles golden washed up in the lake shore, he actually did.
-:-
“There’s a whole team of time-traveling rangers,” Kendall tells him during a closing shift, the café drawn quiet and dark, everyone else halfway home already. But he doesn’t have a home, not really, so he takes the opportunity to stay in the only place where he remotely belongs as long as he can.
“They’re from the future, though,” she continues, tapping her nails on the counter as he puts the chairs up on the tables. “Not like you or Koda.”
“A whole team,” Ivan repeats wonderingly, running his finger over the wood on a chair. Wooden chairs were never this perfectly crafted – machine crafted – in his time. “It’s curious how only me and Koda ended up here, on this team, instead.”
Kendall purses her lips and hops off her stool. “I guess you could call it destiny. The energems knew you were needed here, so they – ” She stops mid-hand gesture, awkwardly, as if just reminded that the two of them had been torn from their families and their homes because of the energems.
He half-smiles. “Do you believe in destiny, Miss Morgan?”
“No,” she says, quickly. Ivan turns to look at her, one eyebrow raised, and finds himself much closer than anticipated since she’d moved over to him. She looks just as startled at their proximity as him, but she doesn’t lessen it, only shakes her head and adds, softer, “No, I believe we control our own destinies.”
He looks down, absentmindedly wiping his hands with his towel. “Is that so? Did you control the purple energem choosing you?”
Kendall sighs, ponytail bouncing as she shakes her head. “That’s different, that’s – that’s magic and monsters and aliens.”
“I agree with you,” he says, making her blink in surprise. “After all, you made the decisions that led to the energem choosing you. And so did we all. Nobody made us worthy, we did so on our own.”
She tilts her head. “I just don’t understand why it would take you away from your family. The other team – Time Force – they chose to come back. My sister chose to travel into space. I chose to help Keeper. You – you didn’t get a choice.”
Ivan looks down, steps back. Her presence so close to him is proving to be a bit of a problem. “I ask myself that every day,” he admits. “But perhaps that’s not where the choice lies. Perhaps it is because, even when we had no choice, we still chose to be heroes. Courage is not the absence of fear – ”
“ – but rather, the triumph over it,” she finishes quietly. He meets her gaze again, finding something warm in there that hadn’t always been there. The dim light of the café makes her look a little hazy, like her edges have been blunted, her sharp essence whittled down to something softer.
“Indeed,” he says with a smile. “The energems chose us for our bravery. Everyone has that choice, no matter if nothing else is left.”
Kendall’s lips quirk, but she doesn’t quite get to a smile. “Even if you’re left all alone in a strange new world?”
“I’m not alone,” he says. “I have you.”
-:-
So, in another world, he doesn’t meet her. He might not be alone, and he might not be sad, but he never meets her. He falls in love with a princess, but he marries someone else. The world has not yet caught up with the idea that people should choose who they love, and so he can’t.
In this world, he never finds a golden stone in a lake and never fights a monster in the woods and never ends up in another time and place, without anyone he loves or anything he knows. He never gets to choose between bravery and fear, between running and staying. He’s a knight, but he’s not a hero.
He dreams of that other world, sometimes, in brief, terrifying flashes. The darkness pressing down on his chest, suffocating him for six hundred years. Watching and waiting, praying for someone to rescue him. Wondering if his sisters and mother were doing all right. Wondering if he’d ever see them again. Knowing he wouldn’t.
The endless pain of being wrenched from your family without getting a choice in it. In another world, he carries it constantly. In this one, he forgets about it when he wakes up. There’s no Fury to hate here. There’s nothing wrong here.
Nothing, except for the fact that he never gets to meet his friends. Maybe every world has its own tragedy, even if you remain unaware. He kisses Princess Catherine in a courtyard of the palace and feels, for a brief moment between her lips and his, like this shouldn’t be happening.
And maybe it doesn’t.
-:-
He finds a golden jewel in a lake and gets trapped inside a monster for six hundred years. He wakes up in a new time, to a new world and a new family. He meets a girl who doesn’t smile as much as the Princess of Zandar did, all those centuries ago, but sometimes she smiles at him, and it means something.
It gives him the choice to be brave. He kisses her because he’s not scared of kissing her anymore, and it doesn’t feel wrong, not even for a minute. She feels right and true and real in his arms. She kisses him back like he’s real, too, and sometimes he has his doubts, but not then, not now.
Maybe the universe knows what it’s doing when it takes away choices. If given the choice, he would never have chosen to leave his family, to leave the prince and the princess, to leave his home. Whether destiny or not, something took the choice away from him to give him another. Maybe one that mattered more, in the end.
“Why’d you do that?” she asks when they part, both of them a little breathless. “Why did you – ”
“I want to be with you,” he tells her, running his thumb over her cheek, marveling at how soft she is under his touch. “I want to be with you.”
That’s a choice. In another world, he doesn’t get that one. But some things – some things are too strange and too strong to be coincidences. Like how lucky he is to be here, in the twenty-first century, with her smiling up at him.
He might be happy in that other world, at home. But he knows for sure that he’s happy here. His energem hums beneath his shirt, and silently, he thanks it for leading him to this world instead.